I don't burn many CD's.  The last one that I burned was for NetBSD 1.6,
I think.  I've lost track of when that was (over a year ago?).

Today, I decided to burn a CD for -current to save myself some
troubles with re-installing my laptop.  (It needs a custom kernel
with a trivial hack to the PCMCIA ne driver that isn't in any distributed
sources, so I need a *really* custom kernel; (^&  Without that hack,
I need to get sources onto the machine, tweak the driver, build a
kernel, and install the new kernel, just to get onto my home
ethernet.  So, a CD with the kenel hack is essential.  I figured
I might as well go with a moderately recent -current, given all of
the troubles I have been having building current from 1.6.)

So...I went to do just that.

First problem, I found that cdrecord didn't believe that cd2 was
able to work.  It didn't say, as I recall, "device not found," or
such.  It gave the same "not supported" message whether I tried to
use cd0, cd1, or cd2.  (I have a real CD drive and a DVD drive,
separate from the CD-RW.  Don't ask.  (^&)

Eventually, for some reason, it occurred to me to chec /dev/cd*,
at which point I discovered:  I only have cd0 and cd1!  No wonder
it didn't work.

So I did mknod's for {,r}cd2{a,d} and tried again.


Now, it goes to completion trying to burn, but the disks that I get
out are totally useless.  I'm not sure that the burner is doing anything
to them.


I have some possible explanations:

 * The media is bad (does this happen?).  The CD-RW drive seems to have
   a hard time deciding what to do with the media.  Maybe the media is
   somehow so badly manufactured that it's not able to be recognized/used?

   But...cdrecord doesn't object (not that that necessarily means
   anything.)

   The media is about a year old, or a bit more.  "K Hypermedia",
   "80 minute" and "multi speed 32x" all are on the jewelbox jacket.
   (The drive cannot write faster than 6x.)

   The media is old, but has just been sitting in its jewel box in
   a CD tower.  It is, of course, unused.

 * The drive needs cleaning (possible).  This would explain why the thing
   has a hard time recognizing media (harder than I thought it did in the
   past).

 * The drive is broken.  (Unlikely.  It doesn't do much; it's mostly
   there for when I want to *write* a CD.)

 * Although it *seems* to be okay when I use it as "cd2", it may not
   actually do anything.  NetBSD seems to somewhat see it there, but
   it's odd that NetBSD doesn't have /dev/ nodes for cd2, so maybe
   there's a (technical) reason?

Any ideas?  Is my experience typical for when CD-RWs go bad, or if they
need cleaning?  (How could it possibly go bad when it's not being used?)

I'm going to try a long shot and power down, disconnect the regular
CD, and see if being renumbered to cd1 helps the situation.  (Given
that cdrecord at least caused activity on the drive, I assume that
this won't really help, but it won't hurt (much) to try...)


-- 
  "I probably don't know what I'm talking about."  http://www.olib.org/~rkr/